The Philosophical Foundation Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology Had Presupposed

Roberts Avens’s Imagination Is Reality (1980) addresses a gap in the post-Jungian literature that few of Hillman’s readers had named but many had felt. James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) had announced an archetypal turn whose ambition was to remove depth psychology from the medical-clinical frame and to locate it within an older Western contemplative lineage of soul-making. The book had done its polemical work. What it had not done — what was not its mode — was supply the philosophical scaffolding under the polemic. Avens, a scholar of religious studies at Iona College trained in both Western philosophy and Asian contemplative traditions, wrote Imagination Is Reality to do precisely that work. The book reads as Hillman’s archetypal psychology’s philosophical complement, and as the case-statement that the polytheistic-imaginal turn in depth psychology has the philosophical resources of the Western contemplative tradition behind it. Avens proceeds by placing four figures in conversation: C. G. Jung (whose late writings on synchronicity, on Mercurius, and on the unus mundus of the Mysterium Coniunctionis prepare the ground), James Hillman (whose archetypal psychology delivers the polytheistic move), Owen Barfield (whose Saving the Appearances provides the philosophy-of-history of consciousness), and Ernst Cassirer (whose three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms supplies the philosophical anthropology of symbolic activity). The result is not a synthesis in the easy sense — Avens preserves the distinctive contribution of each — but an articulation of how four bodies of thought converge on a single proposition: that imagination is not a faculty but the originary mode in which reality discloses itself.

The Mundus Imaginalis: Corbin’s Decisive Contribution to Depth Psychology

The pivotal chapter of Imagination Is Reality introduces Henry Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis, which Corbin had developed across his decades of work on Sufi mysticism, particularly the writings of Ibn ʿArabī and the Ishrāqī school of Suhrawardī. Corbin’s contention — and Avens’s appropriation of it — is that there exists a distinct region of reality, neither the sensible world of perception nor the intelligible world of abstract thought, but an imaginal world (Latin mundus imaginalis rather than the imaginary, mundus imaginarius) that has its own consistency and its own laws. The figures of dreams, of vision, of active imagination, of the alchemical opera are not subjective constructs of the dreamer or the practitioner; they are encounters with what is real in the imaginal order. Corbin had developed this concept primarily for his Sufi material, and the appropriation for depth psychology was implicit in his late writings but undeveloped. Avens’s contribution is to make the appropriation explicit and to demonstrate, with reference to Jung’s active imagination and Hillman’s archetypal practice, that what depth psychology calls the encounter with archetypal figures is what Sufi metaphysics calls entry into the imaginal realm. The clinical implication is not merely terminological. To treat the figures of analysis as imaginal in Corbin’s sense is to grant them an ontological standing that the Cartesian-Lockean Western inheritance had refused them, and to honour the patient’s relation to those figures as a relation to what is, in the imaginal sense, there.

Barfield, Cassirer, and the Long Recovery of the Imaginative

Avens’s philosophical reach is broadest in his treatment of Owen Barfield and Ernst Cassirer. Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) had argued that Western consciousness had moved through three phases — original participation, in which mind and world were not separated; the withdrawal of participation, in which the modern subject confronts an objectified world; and the prospect of a final participation, in which consciousness re-enters the world it had withdrawn from but now does so consciously and creatively. Avens reads Barfield as the philosopher of consciousness whose long-arc account of Western imaginative life is precisely the historical context Jung’s individuation and Hillman’s soul-making require. Cassirer’s monumental three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) supplies the complementary philosophical anthropology: language, myth, and science as three symbolic forms in which the human spirit articulates the world, none of which can be reduced to the others, and all of which constitute reality in their own way. Avens places Cassirer’s neo-Kantian symbolic-form analysis alongside Jung’s symbolic process and demonstrates that the two traditions converge on the same insight from different starting points. The convergence is not a syncretism. Cassirer remains a Marburg-school neo-Kantian, Jung remains a clinician of the unconscious, and the two would not have agreed about much. What they share is the conviction that symbolic activity is not a covering of a non-symbolic real but the very mode in which the real becomes available to consciousness.

Western Nirvana: The Imaginal and the Doctrine of Sunyata

The book’s closing argument — and the source of its sub-title — is Avens’s comparison of Western imaginal practice with the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, emptiness. The comparison is bold and, in Avens’s hands, careful. Sunyata is not nihilism; it is the recognition that no entity has self-existence apart from the web of interdependent arising. The ego’s claim to perceive a substantial, separate, non-imaginal real world is, for the Mahayana tradition, the deepest layer of the metaphysical mistake — the same layer that Jung’s analytic work and Hillman’s archetypal practice and Corbin’s imaginal hermeneutics each in different ways aim to dissolve. Avens’s claim is that the imaginal of the Western contemplative tradition and sunyata of the Mahayana converge on the recognition that what consciousness encounters is always already a presentation, never a brute given, and that the practice of soul-making in any of these traditions is the practice of entering into the imaginal-symbolic structure of the real with one’s ego no longer in the position of a spectator looking on. The comparison is not collapsing one tradition into the other. It is locating depth psychology within a global contemplative discourse that runs from the Bhagavad Gita and the Lotus Sutra to Plotinus, Ibn ʿArabī, Eckhart, and the German Romantics, and onward into the work Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer were each pursuing.

For any reader of Hillman who has wanted the philosophical case for archetypal psychology rather than the polemical performance of it, Imagination Is Reality is the book to read. To read it is to inherit a working grasp of Corbin, Barfield, and Cassirer alongside the Jungian-Hillmanian apparatus, and to see the depth-psychological tradition as it has rarely been seen — as the recent expression of a Western contemplative lineage older than Jung, that the field had been quietly inheriting all along.